MobiMonitor: A mobile app for monitoring distance courses in the Amazon region

Offering upper-level courses for the population that lives in remote areas, like the Amazon, is a huge challenge due to the difficulties of access and the low development level. To address this challenge, the Center for Distance Education (CDE) in Federal University of Amazonas, implemented an educational project that provides distance courses in graduate and undergraduate degree in these places using a Learning Management System (LMS). However, evasion, failure and dropout rates in the disciplines are still worrying. In order to face this problem, MobiMonitor, a mobile application integrated with multi-agent system was developed. This app allows instrumenting course mediators with tools for monitoring students´ behavior and performance in a LMS, especially monitoring student participation in specific academic activities (assignments and forums) and provides support in advance to identify students who need a direct pedagogical intervention in order to avoid possible course evasion, failure or dropout. MobiMonitor enables mediators to check these data on the fly, classifying students´ participation into four levels (excellent, good, low and very low). The mediators access this report by monitoring through mobile application and send alert messages to students according to their attendance status. Experiments conducted in two poles show the feasibility of the proposal.